Standards: Straightjacket or Straight Edge?

Standards were not popular with would-be railroad tycoons in the 1880s. A standard set of railroad tracks eliminated some profitable loading and unloading work. Incompatible tracks kept the other guys’ rolling stock on another guy’s tracks. Eventually standards emerged because a couple of tycoons figured out how to make even more money by standardizing. Many industries go through this wide open approach only to find that over time certain methods or designs become part of the furniture of living.

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Microsoft and Its Taxonomy of Intents

July 19, 2010 — Xiaosin Yin and Sarthak Shah wrote a paper published in April 2010, “Building Taxonomy of Web Search Intents for Name Entity Queries.” We revisited this paper because Yahoo announced that it was considering a service that used popular queries for a new Yahoo news service. You can read a summary of…

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Why Use A Taxonomy Management Tool?

With content management systems offering taxonomy features, why use a taxonomy managment tool at all? There are many reasons why a coordinating taxonomy management tool is not only valuable, but necessary. The system should not be short-circuited by the limitations of a content management system which, trying to serve an array of purposes, doesn’t quite match all the functions served by the original parts.

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Taxonomies and Content Governance

July 5, 2010 — In the 1980s, commercial database producers had an editorial policy. I recall reading the Courier Journal / Data Courier description of the editorial policy for the original ABI/INFORM business database. (Disclosure: Access Innovations was an advisor to the Courier Journal’s commercial database operation.) The idea was that subject matter experts and…

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Semantic Taxonomy Induction

“Semantic Taxonomy Induction from Heterogeneous Evidence” became available in 2006. It was one of the first presentations of a method that is apparently becoming increasingly important at a certain large Web search company.

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